By Jaden Urban, 2 News Nevada, March 19, 2025
Thacker Pass, about an hour away from Winnemucca, is home to possibly the largest lithium reserve in the world.
Lithium Americas and General Motors recently announced a joint venture, and the mine project is fully funded.
It’s been almost two years since 2 News Nevada paid a visit to Thacker Pass, and a lot has changed since our own Arianna Bennett showed us its initial stages, in her Emmy nominated series on it.
On Tuesday, when we went up it was windy, and some snow flurries were falling.
They gave us a bird’s eye view to see what all has changed.
“This thing is moving forward,” said Tim Crowley, Vice President of Government Affairs for Lithium Americas. “We’ve been through years and years to get to this point through engineering, and exploration, and permitting and financing and it’s just exciting now that we are moving forward with our project.”
There were multiple big sections of dirt dug out, where different buildings for helping to extract the lithium from the mine will go.
“Right now, we are doing all of the dirt work to build the foundations for our buildings,” Crowley said. “Often times think a mine, that’s got to be easy, you just have to start digging, but we’re really building a chemical plant here.”
This plant will help remove clay and other minerals from the ores so they can extract the lithium.
They are only a couple months away from where they can start pouring concrete for the foundations of those buildings.
It will take them about two years to build those and then they will be in full production on the mine.
They are trying to do it as efficiently as possible.
“It’s still being developed,” said Cody Davis, Area Manager of Operations and Safety, Sawtooth Mining. “It is still being engineered so we are building it just behind engineering. We are trying to get it up and running so we have a domestic lithium source.”
Crowley says the biggest challenge right now they face is bringing enough workers to the worksite.
“We’ve got over 100 workers now, but nearing the second quarter we’ll be nearing 350 and then we’ll march forward and this will be moving in parallel as our workforce continues to grow,” said Jonathan Evans, CEO, Lithium Americas. “We’ll peak in the second half of 2026 and early 2027.”
Which brings us to the new workforce hub they are building, designed to hold almost two thousand workers when it’s completed.
The workers won’t have to pay for the stay or the food.
“So, with that we need to provide great housing we also don’t want to impact the community negatively, so we know housing is a short supply,” Evans said. “Workers here will be living here, we’ll be bussing them to site to keep traffic off the roads. Feed them on site and bus them back and it’ll be a nice quality environment to hopefully attract the best people that we can.”
The units will be stacked three stories high.
Lithium Americas, along with other companies helping to bring everything to life, gave a tour to Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo and Congressman Mark Amodei.
To start the tour, both the Congressman and the Governor joined folks in a trailer to get an update of the mine out at Thacker Pass and for a quick safety briefing before heading out to the hub.
Then they got the chance to look from above where all the units will be placed.
After that we drove down to see what units look like from the inside.
By the end of the tour, Governor Lombardo expressed his pleasure with it.
“A nice respectable quality living space for a mine that’s going to produce a significant amount of labor hours and workforce and resources that are going to come out of Humboldt County,” Governor Lombardo said.
He also said this could help with local retail, recreation, and restaurants for the city, as well as more future permanent housing.
The Congressman said that he likes that it is fully self-sufficient without pulling from local resources.
“They are not going to have to pack the load of, here’s a couple thousand workers and everything that they need to be supported because Lithium Americas is solving that problem for them,” Congressman Amodei said. “There’ll be some growing pains but not what you would expect, especially historically speaking.”
In terms of building the workforce, they are looking to try and pull from as many locals as possible.
“We’re working with Humboldt County schools and the local tribes to set up pipelines where anyone can enter into our apprentice programs,” said Rob Benner, Executive Security Treasure, Northern Nevada Building Trades. “This project we are looking at topping out at two thousand construction workers. We have a commitment of 25 percent apprentices on this project. That means we’ll have 500 apprentices on this project. That’s 500 opportunities for the local residents to get into a job in construction.”
One caveat with the hub is each mobile unit is only for single workers.
So, for families looking to move out here, they would have to find residence in Winnemucca or another town close by.